Practice makes perfect
-- or so they say. However, the way in which one practices can
make a big difference. An especially important issue concerns
the way in which repeated study opportunities are distributed in
time. Should you study new information repeatedly over a short
period of time (massed practice) or should you space or distribute
your study sessions over a longer period of time? Research in
many labs, including ours, has found that spaced practice leads to
better memory than the same amount of massed practice. This is
known as the spacing effect. Another important
issue concerns the role that testing plays in the learning
process.
When you are trying to learn new information, is it a good idea to
incorporate tests of your knowledge into your practice?
Research from many different labs indicates that the answer is,
"Yes!" In fact, a test is often more effective in improving
subsequent memory than an equivalent amount of additional study on
the same material. Perhaps even more surprising is that this
beneficial effect can occur even when you don't receive feedback on
your test performance! This testing advantage is called the
testing effect. Both the spacing
effect and the testing effect are well established phenomena with
obvious practical applied value. However, neither the limits
of these effects nor their explanations are well understood.
Research in our lab is making progress on understanding the nature
of the underlying mechanisms and the circumstances under which they
operate.
Frequent collaborator: Dr. Gerald Long
Illusions can tell us a
lot about visual perception. The research in our lab focuses
on a particular class of visual illusions known as reversible or
ambiguous figures. These figures can be perceived in two
different ways. For example the figure to the right can be seen as
a young woman or an old woman. If you keep staring at the picture,
your perception will spontaneously flip flop back and forth from one
interpretation to the other. The fact that your conscious visual
experience keeps changing even though the figure you are looking at
does not change at all indicates that the reversals in our
conscious experience are being produced by our visual system. This
makes reversible figures particularly useful for studying the processes
that underlie visual awareness. Research in our
lab has demonstrated that the alternations of conscious experience are
influenced by both top-down processes (e.g., high-level cognitive
processes associated with prior knowledge, expectation, and
attention) and bottom-up processes (e.g., lower-level sensory
processes that operate passively and automatically). Our
continuing research is attempting to clarify the nature of the
top-down and bottom-up processes that contribute to
perceptual reversals and to understand better how top-down and
bottom-up processes are coordinated and integrated in producing
alternations in our conscious perceptual experience.
process.
When you are trying to learn new information, is it a good idea to
incorporate tests of your knowledge into your practice?
Research from many different labs indicates that the answer is,
"Yes!" In fact, a test is often more effective in improving
subsequent memory than an equivalent amount of additional study on
the same material. Perhaps even more surprising is that this
beneficial effect can occur even when you don't receive feedback on
your test performance! This testing advantage is called the
testing effect.
ambiguous figures. These figures can be perceived in two
different ways. For example the figure to the right can be seen as
a young woman or an old woman. If you keep staring at the picture,
your perception will spontaneously flip flop back and forth from one
interpretation to the other. The fact that your conscious visual
experience keeps changing even though the figure you are looking at
does not change at all indicates that the reversals in our
conscious experience are being produced by our visual system. This
makes reversible figures particularly useful for studying the processes
that underlie visual awareness.
perceptual reversals and to understand better how top-down and
bottom-up processes are coordinated and integrated in producing
alternations in our conscious perceptual experience.